XT660R Heaven

Monday, 23 June 2014

Oklahoma - Head west into the sand young man!!

What a day, pretty tough one too... We both fell off, we both had some fairly impressive wobbles in deep sand pits & we out ran two storms...

We set off this morning around 9 ish after some great pancakes, with a plan to reach Alva by the end, we'd managed to watch a few YouTube vids the night before of the trail through into New Mexico, they all showed the same kind of terrain... big open prairies with loads of sand trails & some small creek crossings. We met all of the above.

I managed to set off this morning & have just about everything go wrong almost from the off, it was one of those mornings you wish you hadn't got out of bed for. I decided to wear less gear as it was getting hotter & hotter the further west we go, so I set off in a t-shirt & motocross trousers, I'm never happy riding without some kind of protection, so was a bit out of sorts with this. I'd managed to pick up another slow puncture yesterday, this time in my rear, so I had to keep stopping to blow this up every few miles, mainly because it was too hot to stop & fight the back wheel in & out, It's not an easy task without a stand really. Anyhow on one of the stops, I found all kinds of little faults which I tried to repair unsuccessfully, then I rode off leaving my iphone on a pannier, so it bounced off into the undergrowth, taking 20 mins to find, all in all very frustrating & I had a mini tantrum, which did me the world of good but not sure about Geoff!! :-)

Anyhow back on the road, things settled down for a bit, we kept eyeing up some very serious looking storm clouds that were heading our way, but we turned north & they seemed to drift eastwards. After a fuel stop in the early afternoon, we hit the sand. The first time I was doing 60mph & had a proper tank slapping moment with the bars swinging from side to side, nothing for the front to grip into & as I coasted down to a more grippy 25mph, I settled down, the bike settled down & we then carried on for a few miles before riding into some trees & literally into two little fords. Geoff cleared the first one & fell at the second, I fell at the first & cleared the second... the bikes took a right bashing, Geoff picked up a few scrapes & loads of the algae that had grown all over both fords. Very Very slippy place!!!

Geoff covered in slime & mud...

So after we picked ourselves up, straightened up things on the bikes we headed off again & got back into the sand. The rest of the day was spent avoiding the little sand pits that kept appearing en route. As we rode into Alva, the biggest grey storm clouds were swinging our way again, so we raced into town to find a motel for the night. Phew again!!

We've seen loads of wildlife today too, a couple of Ospreys, one was a young one that was being chased away from something by a small but angry mother bird, loads of rabbits & hares & a deer that ran alongside me for several hundred metres before running into some trees, it was doing 35mph!!!
Bloody fab stuff...

So that's today, we're half way across Oklahoma, it's tougher than we thought & not quite as straight as we thought either, although there are some seriously long straight bits, one was 32 miles long!!

So another day starts tomorrow, we plan to do another 200 ish mile day depending upon the sandy bits, we'll see...